More than anything else in our cities, graffiti and its removal creates a dynamic, ongoing visual conversation that plays out across pretty much every urban surface. Over at Medium’s Re:Form, Ian Besler investigates the process with Los Angeles’s graffiti abatement program, which removed one square mile of graffiti from LA’s streets in 2014.

8 January 2015

Graffiti artist Nikita Nomerz travels around Russia with a cool project called The Living Wall, where he brings old architectonical structures to life by painting playful human faces, eyes and hands on them.

5 September 2014

If you’re a well-known street artist who wants your legacy to live on through your kids, you’re going to want to get them comfortable with graffiti at a young age. Except that handing a three-year-old a can of spray paint or a thick indelible marker is a terrible idea. They need to hone their skills with something considerably less permanent — like this marker-shaped piece of chalk for making graffiti that’s only temporary.

26 June 2014

Graffiti may be ephemeral, but then there’s Google Street View with its all-seeing camera. Inspired by Google’s recent to move to let users go back in time in Street View, Brian Foo at the New York Public Library Labs thought he could make us look at street graffiti from a new perspective — through time.

11 June 2014

Street art is mutable by definition. But Google Street View, the archiver of all worldly street-borne phenomena from gentrification to wildlife, wants to change that with its Google Street Art Project — an archival website of the world’s street art from Buenos Ares to Atlanta.

20 May 2014

In late 2012, a vandal approached a painting by Mark Rothko hanging in London’s Tate Modern, and scrawled it with graffiti. It took the Tate over nine months of work to successfully restore the painting before it went back on display last week. This video shows the amazing science and craft that went into the job.

17 May 2014

Video: Street artist INSA mixes graffiti and animation and calls it GIF-iti. He thinks big and doesn’t shirk, producing multiple super sized wall filling works which he digitises and repeatedly overpaints, rendering the results. Street art is by its nature temporal but INSA’s work will last forever — or at least until they pull the plug on the web.

30 April 2014

Graffiti is an interesting pendulum swing. On the one hand, it can be incredibly beautiful and detailed. On the other, it’s mindless tagging that can be a blight on a city. Vandals looking to tag Melbourne’s train carriages are finding more and more daring ways of getting the job done, attacking signal points and train infrastructure to execute daring raids.

14 April 2014

Robots may be taking our jobs throughout agriculture and industry, but the the duty of defacing architecture is likely to remain in the hands of humans for the immediate future if this semi-autonomous spray-paint drone is any evidence.